Wednesday, October 16, 2013

The show was called Superheroes:
A Never-Ending Battle, and was a mostly engaging
history of the superhero genre, starting with the publication of the original Superman story in Action
Comics #1 in June 1938. Written
by Michael Kantor and Lawrence Masdon (and directed by Kantor), this show was
created in such a way that it could be sliced up into three separate episodes
(which was welcome in that it gave us necessary bathroom breaks — one enduring
problem with noncommercial television is when do you get to use the bathroom
when nature tells you to) but for its premiere was shown complete. If there was
a fault I could find with this episode it’s that they tended to treat the
superhero genre as something de novo and totally American — but just as the Broadway musical
grew out of European operetta, the American superhero comics grew out not only
of American pulp magazine stories (Kantor and Masdon make the rather
provocative case that Batman is merely a rehash of The Shadow, though they
ignore the even more obvious derivation of Superman from Doc Savage; though Doc
Savage was an ordinary human produced by selective breeding rather than an
alien from another planet, he was called the “Man of Bronze” vs. Superman’s
“Man of Steel,” and like Superman his first name in his non-super alternate
identity was “Clark” — a name both Doc Savage creator Lester Dent and Superman
creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster seem to have got from Clark Gable!) but a
long tradition of European hero literature. If there’s an ur-superhero story that really defined the clichés of
the genre, it’s probably Baroness
Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel; like both Superman and Batman, he concealed his real
identity behind a masquerade as a milquetoast character; and like Superman he
was both male points in a bizarre love triangle with a woman who went gaga for
his superhero identity and couldn’t stand his normal one. And the first
superhero created by an American writer was probably Johnston McCulley’s
Scarlet Pimpernel knock-off, Zorro.

The writers attribute Batman to the Shadow
and the Joker simply to the joker figure in a card deck, ignoring the two
classic silent films Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, always said were his
inspirations: the 1926 adaptation of Mary Roberts Reinhart’s The Bat (though in that case the person in bat-guise is
actually a master criminal posing as a detective — ironically, Jerry Siegel’s original conception of
Superman in 1932 was also as a super-villain and it was only in later drafts that he became a
superhero instead) and the 1928 The Man Who Laughs, in which Jack P. Pierce’s hideous makeup for
Conrad Veidt to play Gwynplaine, a captive turned by the Gypsies who stole him
into a monster by altering his face into a permanent grin, was the obvious
model for the Joker. (The still from The Man Who Laughs in Clive Hirschhorn’s book The Universal Story gave the game away well before I saw the film —
and, indeed, while the film was still thought lost.) The filmmakers managed to
score interviews with quite a lot of people involved in creating superhero
comics — including artist Carmine Infantino, who was one of the most colorful
and compelling characters in it (and who for some reason is not listed in the imdb.com cast list) — as well as
actors who played superheroes on TV, notably Adam West in the 1960’s camp Batman and Lynda Carter from Wonder Woman (and oddly Carter was not a sex bomb; one reason she was credible in the
role was she was credibly muscular and not drop-dead gorgeous). The documentary
at least touched on the incredibly exploitative practices of comic-book
publishers — as late as the early 1990’s artists and writers who asked for
royalties on their works were routinely shown the door (that’s when a number of
top people at Marvel walked and started their own company, Image Comics) — and
mentioned that it was not until 1978, with the release of the blockbuster Superman movie (the first feature film built around a
superhero character — earlier superhero films had been either theatrical
serials or TV series), that Siegel and Shuster got residual payments and full
screen credit as Superman’s creators.

To my mind, the most interesting episodes
here were the first two — detailing the prehistory of the comic superheroes and
their first two waves of popularity, in the 1940’s and the 1960’s. The show
went into the crisis that faced the comics publishers when religious groups and
self-appointed moralists went after them in the early 1950’s — there’s even a
film clip of Dr. Frederick Wertham before a Congressional committee saying his famous line that Batman and Robin were “a
wish-fulfillment fantasy of two homosexuals living together” (oddly, Wertham
wasn’t always a reactionary prig; he was also one of the social-science experts
who testified against segregation in one of the cases that became Brown v. Board of Education) — much as they had against the movie studios in
1934 — and the response of the comics industry was the same one that had worked
for the movie business. They formed their own self-censorship business, the
“Comics Code Authority,” which was given the authority to review and approve
every comic before it went out. Among the rules of the Authority’s version of
the Production Code were no horror titles at all (which was a major hit to
William Gaines’ business, Entertaining Comics, though Gaines’ other main title,
the satire magazine Mad, proved
so successful in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s his company stayed in
business and even prospered) and no references to drugs. This was what finally
led to the breakdown of the Authority in 1971 when Stan Lee commissioned a
Spider-Man episode in which Spider-Man rescues a young man who’s overdosed and
hurled himself off a rooftop under the delusion that he could fly. More could
probably be made of the irony of a character in a superhero comic being under
the delusion he could fly when the
recurring characters themselves either flew, like Superman, or came so close to
doing so, like Batman and Spider-Man, it made virtually no difference
plot-wise. Anyway, the Authority rejected the Spider-Man issue with the drug storyline — and Stan Lee did
exactly what Otto Preminger had done 15 years earlier when the Production Code
Adminstration refused to give a Code seal to his anti-drug piece, the film The Man with the
Golden Arm: he released the book without
the seal, it was a best seller and the Authority modified the Code to make it
more liberal.

I was probably most interested in the middle segment because it
covered the 1960’s, the decade during which I read comic books (like a lot of people back then I
read a fair number of comics while I was the target age for them and then
stopped as I grew into teenager-dom) and fell in love with Batman (purely
platonically!) through the campy mid-1960’s TV show — which led me to the
reprints of the 1940’s and 1950’s Batman stories, with their much richer,
darker, noir approach to the character
that would get revived with the Dark Knight series, first in the comics (courtesy of the
reclusive writer Alan Moore, who is actually shown here being interviewed — which is something like
seeing J. D. Salinger do the Tonight Show — and who bears a striking, and not altogether inappropriate,
resemblance to the rock musician Roy Wood, who founded the Move and Electric
Light Orchestra but unfortunately left after ELO’s first album — he was
essentially John Lennon to Jeff Lynne’s Paul McCartney and ELO would have been
considerably more interesting and less critically maligned if he’d stayed) and
then in the Christopher Nolan movies — of which, oddly, I didn’t care for the
first two but quite liked the third, The Dark Knight Rises. The third portion is a typical story for the 21st
century in that it depicts the superhero business as bigger than ever — virtually all the big summer blockbuster releases are superhero
stories of one form or another — even while the original delivery form, comic
books, is fading like virtually all other print media and distribution of
superhero comics is being taken over by, you guessed it, the Internet via
e-readers, tablets and all those other God-awful devices that are supplanting
ink on paper. It also mentions the writers and artists who are doing D.I.Y.
superheroes on line — though it’s hard to tell from just seeing this work
flashed momentarily on screen in a TV documentary if any of it is any good.

Overall
this was an interesting show, a bit overwrought in comparing the superhero
mythologies to previous cultures’ versions of myths and legends — what’s most
interesting about the superhero business (and it was certainly a big part of
the “history of Superman” book I read recently) is that whereas previous
cultures evolved their legends organically over time, this capitalist culture has turned its mythology, like
everything else, to private profit-making corporations. So if these characters
follow the Zeitgeist, it’s
because market researchers in the big companies have carefully crafted them to
do so based on audience surveys and other inputs to try to give them a handle
on what the audience will like. Not that they always guess right, but it’s
clear that — like all other
products in the corporate-capitalist marketplace — the superhero stories are
designed to give the audiences “what they want” and at the same time to
reinforce the system of production under which they’re created so that audience
dissatisfaction, rebellion and alienation gets channeled into “safe” realms —
like the ending of the film The Dark Knight Rises, which reasserts the primacy and legitimacy of
official law enforcement against the superheroes and the rebels of both Left and Right; or (to detach a
bit from the superhero genre — though Katniss Everdeen is as mythic a figure as anyone created by
the comics industry) the Hunger Games trilogy, which begins as a neo-socialist critique of the corporate
state of today, then creates a “revolutionary” state which is just as
oppressive as the Capital elite, and finally ends in a Voltairean anarchist
scene of the heroine, no longer involved in anything as futile as activism,
retreating to her private life and literally tending her garden. Think the world is a lousy
place, our modern capitalist myth-makers ask? You’re right, but anything you
try to do about it collectively will only make things worse — so suffer it and
do what you can to make life better for yourself as an individual.